This week has shot by, like an overcrowded bus sailing past your stop when you’re waiting miserably in the rain, so it’s hard to recall many specifics. I know there were two evenings when I was ready for bed at about half eight, and now the evenings are getting darker earlier I was convinced it was an hour or two later than it really was. I vaguely remember eating crisps for my dinner once or twice: too tired to lift the pan to the stove and open a tin of something; instead I slumped with unhealthy snacks.
I recall with too much clarity the distress I felt after a Year 11 lesson, where the majority muddle
pathetically through their coursework whilst a hard-core of annoying brats prefer to disrupt the lesson
with silly talk and interruptions, damaging the chances of those who want to get their piece of paper that
will enable them to get to beauty school or join the army or whatever it is they’ve decided to do in little
over six months. I’ve used the “Grow up” chastisement on a bunch of immature boys who seem obsessed with
discovering, in their words, “Which way pupil y swings” and who crack up every time the words “suck” or
“blow” are used, which unfortunately is quite a lot as they feature in the book we’re currently limping
through. At any one time, a third of the class is missing, which should be a relief to my battered eardrums,
but instead sends my stress levels sky high because we can’t make the progress we need to right now.
Then there are the students who arrived in school a few weeks back, embarking on their teacher training
courses and veering between waggy-tailed enthusiasm and wide-eyed horror. They keep appearing at my door when
I least expect them, in order to observe me having a nervous breakdown when they really should be taking notes
on how long I spend talking, organising kids into groups, encouraging and summarising. After each lesson
they hang around to ask me questions I can’t answer, like why I deviated from the scheme of work or how I
would usually motivate the kids that were muttering “bollocks” under their breath. They seem to enjoy
pointing out to me in the nicest way possible that so-and-so at the back spent the lesson constructing a
rubber-band ball rather than completing the work I’d set, which I was well aware of all along of course,
and was just happy that so-and-so had found something constructive to do rather than hit his classmates,
which is his normal approach to my subject. Whenever they try to show me up like this I try to smile
sweetly and give them a textbook answer, but am usually so frazzled that instead I point to the spelling
mistakes they have made in their observation notes and sashay away with what I like to think is some dignity
left intact. You see, one half of me is entirely brimming with empathy, remembering my own shell-shock when
I myself was training to be a teacher. And the other half thinks: don’t fuck with me, college boy. I’m trying
my hardest to show you what a good lesson should look like and you want to tell me about rubber-band boy at
the back? Don’t mess with what you don’t understand…
added 16/10/05
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